Review: Unleash Your Confidence by Vlad Dolezal

Mar 10

Posted in Reviews

Lack of confidence is one of those issues that most people have. For me, it used to be meeting new people. For you, it might be speaking in public or launching a new project. So I’ve been thinking about creating some kind of confidence resource for a while, particularly since I’ve been increasing my own confidence.

But now I don’t have to write something, because Vlad Dolezal has a new ebook out called Unleash Your Confidence, and it’s excellent. (Read the whole review – there’s a surprise from me near the end.)

Who the hell is Vlad Dolezal?

I “met” life coach Vlad Dolezal when I was preparing to launch my Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding course. A Google ad in my gmail alerted me to his free course on procrastination. I subscribed to it, as well as to several others – and his was far and away the best. I emailed him to tell him so, and invite him to be part of my Eight Action Takers post, and he graciously accepted.

The other anti-procrastination courses I found had the faults of so much personal development crap material:

There was nothing in them that a reasonably intelligent person couldn’t figure out for themselves,
They consisted of what I call “vague encouragement”, without much in the way of concrete exercises to actually change things, and
They were flat-out dull.

Not so with Vlad’s. He had specific techniques which he explained well, which weren’t just worthy good conventional advice, and he presented them in a casual, enjoyable yet always responsibly professional voice. (His site is called “Fun Life Development”, and he delivers on that promise.)

So when he approached me (personally, not in a mass mailout) to be part of launching his Unleash Your Confidence ebook, I had high expectations. And I can tell you that all of the same good things that I’ve just said about his procrastination course are also true of his ebook on confidence. It’s well-written, concrete, practical and enjoyable.

5 products I won’t review

A while back, I looked at another confidence product which had an attractive affiliate program (meaning, if I recommended it I would potentially earn nice money). I subscribed and read through the lessons – nah. Not going to recommend that to my subscribers, sorry. It was flat and ordinary and I just couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for it.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had five approaches by people wanting to joint-venture with me in various ways. One came from a virtual assistant who misspelled my name even more badly than people usually do, and asked me to promote a website that didn’t excite me – I ignored that one. One came off as spammy, and I ignored that too. One was just another worthy vague encouragement ebook, like a thousand others (ironic, given that it was about how to stand out as an individual). And the fourth relied on a technique which I’m not convinced is effective.

Vlad’s was the fifth, and it’s the only one I’m going to recommend to you. I am very, very fussy about the products I review – too fussy, in some ways. Most personal development products get me thinking, “I could write a better one than this.” Vlad’s got me thinking, “I wish I’d written this.”

Yes, it has an affiliate program, which I’m part of – if you buy it using my link, I get some money. But that’s true of most of the ones I didn’t review, too.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been increasing my own confidence over the past several years, and the methods I’ve used are largely the ones in this book.

What’s in the box

So what’s in Unleash Your Confidence?

The main part is a 55-page ebook. It starts with a minimal amount of definition and theory (I’m always happy to see minimal theory and maximal practice). Then it sets out half a dozen straightforward, well-described techniques to increase your confidence. They are:

Changing your “mental movies” around situations where you don’t feel confident,
Dealing with the voice in your head that criticises you and reduces your confidence,
Moving beyond the limiting beliefs you hold about yourself and the world,
Taking gradual action to build up your confidence,
Using confident body language to feed back into your mental state, and
Pre-capturing a confident mental state to play back in critical situations.

Throughout, he uses everyday images and metaphors to make his points clear, and tells you exactly how to do the exercises that will (I’m confident) change your thoughts and feelings about the situations that currently intimidate you.

The version I read was an Adobe pdf, but if you like to read on a mobile device like an iPhone or a Kindle, Vlad also provides it in .mobi and .epub. Nice.

As a bonus, he also includes a second ebook setting out a personal development technique called the GROW model. GROW is an acronym, and the technique is fresh and well-thought-out.

At this point in a review I usually talk about what I didn’t like, but honestly, there wasn’t anything. Vlad’s name may be hard to spell, but his ebook is easy to recommend.

It’s $11 (USD) this week and $17 thereafter. That, folks, is a bargain. Go and buy Unleash Your Confidence.

(Vlad will send you an emailed receipt. As an extra inducement, if you forward that receipt to me, confidence@hypno.co.nz, I will send you a download link for my audio track Confident Person as an additional bonus. No extra charge, as long as you’ve bought through the link above.)